The Poetics of Greek Ekphrasis: From the Hellenistic Period to Late Antiquity

This volume examines the literary figure of ekphrasis with a particular focus on its role in an overarching poetic or artistic design. As a literary phenomenon with roots in the earliest Greek poetry, ekphrasis has been traditionally defined as Kunstbeschreibung (‘art description’). Recent scholarship has challenged this definition and broadened it to extend beyond descriptions of artworks and beyond poetic contexts. Nevertheless, ekphrasis retains the basic outline of a sensory, especially visual, experience translated into words. As such it invites an audience to engage with a real or imagined object and to reflect on the text-as-object and its artistic construction. The sensory element of ancient ekphrasis allows this literary device to raise questions of perception and cognition, as well as materiality, spatiality, and aesthetics. The papers in this volume engage with a variety of texts and objects which shed new light on the special relationship between ekphrasis and poetry, ekphrasis and art. The material covered here ranges from the Hellenistic period, where ekphrasis experienced its great efflorescence, to Late Antiquity, and it will be of interest to literary scholars, art historians, and archaeologists.
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